Neil Wehrle

Wired Science has a short discussion about how humans recognize and process facial characteristics and why we sometimes stare at people with facial deformities. An evolutionary response causes our brain to momentarily stumble when we see people that don’t have symmetrical features:

To decide, your eyes sweep over the person’s face, retrieving only parts, mainly just his nose and eyes. Your brain will then try to assemble those pieces into a configuration that you know something about.

When the pieces you supply match nothing in the gallery of known facial expressions, when you encounter a person whose nose, mouth or eyes are distorted in a way you have never encountered before, you instinctively lock on. Your gaze remains riveted, and your brain stays tuned for further information.

“When a face is distorted, we have no pattern to match that,” Rosenberg said. “All primates show this [staring] at something very different, something they have not evolved to see. They need to investigate further. ‘Are they one of us or not?’ In other species, when an animal looks very different, they get rejected.”

Some of this response might be applicable to interface design, one would think. How do we respond to interfaces that aren’t symmetrical or don’t fit a recognizable pattern? Are the same processes at work? Some studies show interfaces that are better designed are percieved as more usable than funtionally identical, but poorly designed ones.

Douglas Bowman posted today on about his decision to leave Google, where he was a Lead Visual Designer. He sounds torn: on the one hand it is a fast-paced environment where you can define an entirely new practice with the ability to affect millions of users. On the other hand it is a strongly engineering-driven culture, where decisions are made based on hard data. I’ve encountered workplaces that fit that description and almost every other one as well. Whether its engineers, MBAs, marketers, or even other designers, an environment that doesn’t understand and respect the role of design can be extremely hard to work in.

Douglas is right in identifying what has always been a deal-breaker for me: if top management doesn’t get it, forget it. I don’t expect CEOs to have degrees in design, but they should have an appreciation that it is more than styling, more than just the touching up at the end of a product development process. I’m willing to work with a CEO that is willing to be brought around, too, but its almost hopeless when your role is not understood and poorly utilized (true for anyone, but I’m focused on design here). I’m perfectly happy to discuss the merits of any design decision I’ve made, but I’ve encountered a lot of dishonesty when the guys who cooked up the numbers in the Powerpoint deck are unwilling to acknowledge so, or the tech team won’t concede that there are many more solutions available to the problem at hand. I’m not saying people are intentionally lying, but many fields have the veneer of science so that people are convinced they are actually producing scientifically valid work.

So what happens then is a Science vs. Art debate. Design decisions are percieved to be all a matter of opinion – most people have eyes, and therefore the ability to judge what’s in front of them. Paradoxically, the designer’s judgement is not respected when the subject matter is so easily manipulated. What can happen next is the descent into data.

In an effort to placate a manager who just doesn’t like what he sees, design decisions are subjected to quantitative analysis. In many cases, there are strong arguments for using data to guide design decisions, whether usability issues are at stake, page load times are affected, and even brand perceptions. In many cases, incremental design decisions can best be informed by data. I’m a huge proponent of incorporating testing into the product development process – not as a validation at the end, but a part of the process. But when people are spending time testing between 41 shades of blue, clearly some time is being wasted.

All of us rely on judgement to make it through our daily lives and our work. Designers rely on judgement (based on years of training and practice), along with data and input from stakeholders, users, competitors, etc. to develop solutions. The solutions are indeterminate, and often not apparent until after the solution has been arrived at. And of course, there are several available options. All this makes the ability to arrive at a solution extremely valuable.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “Black Swan” offers tips for life and accept randomness: http://bit.ly/a2ni

Taleb’s top life tips

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

(via Boingboing)

One of the pleasures of holiday breaks is the opportunity to read an entire book in a short period of time. Many books I have read were consumed in fits and starts, at night or on the subway. Over the winter 2008-09 break I had the pleasure to read The World Without Us, which came recommended by my friend Yetsuh. I recall when it came out that it would fit neatly into the kind of pop-science writing I enjoy, but for some reason never picked up a copy until I was shopping for presents in the local book store (one for me, one for them).

To start, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is well-written and well-researched, but I most enjoyed the central device of the book, which is an Earth where humans have instantly and completely disappeared. The author Alan Weisman uses this to deliver a not-altogether uplifting picture of the destructive impact we have on our planet. He moves from the obvious constructed world to the less noticed, but perhaps more consequential, environments of the undersea and forests, then ancient civilzations (for the latter, Jared Diamond goes into equally sobering depth).

The author’s technique of zooming into and out of a problem to gain perspective reminded me of methods I use to do the same in approaching design problems. He does this literally by discussing microbes around us to space vehicles we’ve sent out, as well as moving rapidly through time to cover the impact of mankind in prehistory. The section on plastics and their utter foreign-ness to our planet was deeply disturbing.

Over time I’ve read most of what’s in this book, I’ve never seen it all put together in a way that reveals so many connections. For example, I’ve heard theories about why megafuana in North America disappeared abruptly about 13,000 years ago. Speculation is that humans migrating from Asia easily slaughtered giant sloths, mammoths and camels that weren’t used to them. Weisman goes further and suggests that African megafuana still exist because they evolved with humans over millenia, and this might be their only hope for survival. Weisman traces the diaspora of humans to the point of their tragic re-introduction to their ancestors in Africa in one particularly moving passage.

At the end few remedies are offered outside of the premise of the book, but this is powerful enough to make one realize the scope of work that must be done to salvage what’s left. It’s clear that life will continue on without humans, and will in many ways be better off without us. As a designer, I have some choices in the life cycle of products, but it is as a consumer and citizen that I can have the biggest impact.

http://www.someecards.com/upload/get_well/i_dont_mind_if_you_get.html